Prayer Life

We don't wonder that our prayer life falls so short of God. We often don't pay the least bit of attention to what we are praying about.So often we consider our prayer as just a job we have to do,  a duty to be performed. We "get it out of the way" and then relax, glad to leave it behind us. When we are at prayer, we are on duty, instead of being with God.
We find it hard to be sorry for praying so poorly. How can we hope to speak with God? God is so distant and so mysterious. When we pray, it's as if our words have disappeared down some deep, dark well, from which no echo ever comes back to reassure us that we have struck the ground of God's heart. God's silence when we pray is really a discourse filled with infinite promise, unimaginably more meaningful than any audible word that God could speak to the limited understanding of our narrow hearts, a word that itself would have to become as small and as poor as we are.
It was Father Walter’s prayer life that held his spiritual journey together, even when he was most persecuted and betrayed, and Lubianka prison was in many respects a school of prayer. As with any spiritual journey concerned with growth in prayer, there is always a purification process. As described in his memoir, “He Leadeth Me,” Walter Ciszek experienced the “sinking feeling of helplessness and powerlessness” after his arrest in Russia in 1941. He felt completely cut off from everything and everyone who might conceivably help him. Considered a Vatican spy, he was transferred to Lubianka prison where men were betrayed and reportedly broken “in body and spirit.” As he had done in every crisis in the past when there was no one to turn to, Walter “turned to God in prayer.”
Our prayer need not be enthusiastic and ecstatic to succeed in placing us so much in God's power and at God's disposal that nothing is held back from God. Prayer can be real prayer, even when it is not filled with bliss and jubilation or the shining brilliance of a carefree surrender of self.  Prayer can be like a slow interior bleeding, in which grief and sorrow make the heart's blood of the inner person trickle away silently into our own unfathomed depths.
We must stand every ready and waiting, so that when God opens the door to the decisive moment of our lives -- and maybe God will do it very quietly and inconspicuously -- we shall not be so taken up with the affairs of this world that we miss the one great opportunity to enter into ourselves and into God.